Today I took my metal detector and went exploring near a depopulated Arab village. I found a valuable silver coin from Mandatory Palestine, circa 1934, along with bullet casings and some other interesting but worthless junk.

"I mean tell me, PZ, why you wouldn’t do to me what you do to Palestinians?"

I see more Arabs here in Israel on a daily basis then you see in a year.
The Arabs I see here in Israel are thriving and no one bothers them. In all the time I've spent here in Israel, I've never once seen a Jew raise his voice to an Arab, much less his hand. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying I've never seen it ( and this is a small country).

My use of the Damascus blood libel was illustrative; both Moslems and Christians used it against the Jews. There was another blood libel accusation in Jerusalem in the 1830's but the accusers were arrested.

I also use the Damascus blood libel because my family in Jerusalem were instrumental in freeing the Jews arrested but not tortured to death in Damascus.

"There was never anything to stop the Jews of Bagdad, Istanbul, Izmir, Salonica, Damascus or Cairo from moving to Palestine if they wanted"

Well. Shabtai Tzvi, the Jewish 'false messiah', sought an ingathering of the Jews and a return to the Land of Israel. The Ottoman sultan offered Shabtai Tzvi a choice, convert to Islam or die. Shabtai Tzvi converted.

" The recognition of Israel led in some measure to former Defense Secretary Forrestal's demise. Attacked in the NY gossips over his personal life and sacked by Truman, he disintegrated, believed himself to be harassed by Zionists, and ultimately committed suicide."

Low blow. Phil.

I challenge you to present one shred of evidence that Zionism had anything to do with Forrestal's suicide.

Correct. Predisposition or indoctrination by the government agent is not clear, but as Judge Gershon stated in the article, it never is clear.

Correct. Blowing up the Verrazano Narrow Bridge IS 'crazy'. This is a huge steel suspension bridge with thousands of daily commuters and guarded by police and surveillance equipment. Not so a subway station. Think Madrid and London tubes bombings.

I don't know if the Siraj jury arrived at the right verdict. I'm a defense attorney and jury verdicts are a mystery to me too. What I do know is that Mondoweiss should make the minimal effort to contact a trial attorney or juror and ask them, 'What happened?'
Mondoweiss should not make the conclusory statement that a 'false conflation of Israel of America' had anything to do with whether there was justice in this case.

Phil. Before saying 'j'accuse', consider two things from the book review article.

'On May 17, Siraj came up with the idea of placing a bomb in the subway. What took place between the two men during the eight months, and thirty-five to forty meetings, leading up to this plot remains largely unknown, even after the trial.'

'Siraj expresses, in grandiose terms, his desire to avenge America’s mistreatment of Muslims. He also made a scouting trip to the subway station with Eldawoody and Elshafay and created a crude drawing of the target.'
.
Siraj had a trial and was convicted. Maybe someone from Mondoweiss should interview a juror from the Siraj trial and find out why 12 New Yorkers voted for a conviction instead of concocting this 'false conflation of America and Israel' phantom.

Hamas is political Islam and it's mentor is the Moslem Brotherhood. Political Islam is a worldwide phenomena and Israel could not have stopped the idea of political Islam from taking root in Gaza. Israel let Sheik Yassin grow his social help network after the sheik began stockpiling weapons, Israel throw him into jail. The rest is history.

So devout Israeli Jews shouldn't live in Judea/Samaria because that's illegal. They shouldn't live apart from Israeli Arabs because that's racist and apartheid-like, and they shouldn't move into Arab-Jewish cities.

In the article you link to, only two names are mentioned: The first prize winner and one of the third prize winners. None of the 8 students who won the second prize are mentioned, 2 of whom have Arab names and 6 – Hebrew names. The two with the Arab names appears first because the names are listed in an alphabetic order. Your conclusion of deliberate deletion of Arab students’ names in the article would carry more authority if Hebrew name winners from of the second prize had made it into the article. There were three names in the third prize category but only one was indicated. which suggests to me some sort of editorial decision that has nothing to do with ethnicity or religion.

If you want to make a case for discrimination, you would have to explain why, out of the 12 names only two were mentioned at all. And why, when 8 of the unmentioned names are Jewish, do you take special interest in the non-mention of the Arab names? Do you think they should have been given special attention, because they were Arab students? If so, why?

BTW. Most urban dwelling Zionists who emigrated to Eretz Yisroel first lived in Jaffa, among her Arabs, until 'disturbances' forced the Zionists to leave Jaffa and take up residence in nearby Tel Aviv.

"..as with Haifa, the exodus from the town[Jaffa] was triggered by the start of hostilities, which was initiated by Jaffa's militiamen, who began sniping into neighboring Tel Aviv on 30 November. The following day dozens of Arabs assaulted Jewish houses bordering on the Northern Manshiya neighborhood and an Arab mob in Abu Kabir attacked a Jewish car and murdered its three passengers. Jewish retaliatory strikes followed."

Palestine was created by the League of Nations and Jews were invited to settle there with the full backing of the Mandatory Government. Jews did that and 25 years later the situation deteriorated and a civil war ensueded with thousands or Jewish and Arab casualties. The Arabs of Palestine lost that war. A Jewish State was declared on only 70% of Mandatory Palestine. Most Arab refugees from the civil war were not allowed to return to their homes.

"On March 31, 1971, Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labor at Fort Leavenworth.
Of the 26 officers and soldiers initially charged for their part in the My Lai Massacre or the subsequent cover-up, only Calley was convicted.

Many in America were outraged by Calley's sentence; Georgia's governor Jimmy Carter instituted "American Fighting Man's Day" and asked Georgians to drive for a week with their lights on.

Indiana's governor asked all state flags to be flown at half-staff for Calley, and Utah's and Mississippi's governors also disagreed with the verdict.[

The Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, New Jersey, and South Carolina legislatures requested clemency for Calley. Alabama's governor George Wallace visited Calley in the stockade and requested that Nixon pardon him.

After the conviction, the White House received over 5000 telegrams; the ratio was 100 to 1 in favor of leniency. In a telephone survey of the American public, 79% disagreed with the verdict, 81% believed that the life sentence Calley had received was too stern, and 69% believed Calley had been made a scapegoat.

Mona should have stood on a soapbox next to the offensive poster and expressed her views without defacing Pamela's message. Mona could have reached a wide audience of subway commuters and upheld our cherished Western values at the same time.

"Amdocs/Comverse Insosys (Israeli based communication systems with access to 95% of all American phone calls) access Mona’s phone, text, etc to know when she was coming. The timing is odd. Unless Hall stands there 24/7"

Don't bother to you check under your bed at night for Jews. They can shape-shift into cockroaches.

"This was a provocation. An Arab driver arrived in a Jewish neighborhood on Yom Kippur with blaring music, and refused to leave when asked to by local residents. We believe he was intoxicated. This was a deliberate act," Galilee Police spokesman Ch.-Supt. Eran Shaked said.

BTW. Three Arab homes were damaged by fire. Five Arab homes were not burned to the ground.

BTW. I thought arab Acco was famous for probably being the only city to withstand a seige by Napolean Bonaparte.

Are you insane? Arabs do whatever they please on Yom Kippur. Okay. Maybe the malls are closed but the mall owners are entitled to open and close their businesses as the see fit. No?
When all the Jews in Israel stop whatever they're doing for a two minute of silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Arabs cruise on the highways doing what the please, which bothers nobody.

I really don't know what is happening in Syria and this blog certainly does nothing to inform. It appears to be a religious, secterian civil war where Assad kills more people but loses territorial control.

Phil has a influential blog which he uses quite effectively to air his views. He doesn't need to bring his politics to a garden party. Many would consider that boorish. Where does the politiking stop, Colin?
Weddings and funerals?

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